


Hold You Up Above the World

by beckalina



Series: Scenes from an American Movie [2]
Category: Jonas Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, POV Outsider, Scenes From an American Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-23
Updated: 2010-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beckalina/pseuds/beckalina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From that day forward, Nick was the only baby that Joe wanted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold You Up Above the World

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the "Scenes From an American Movie" 'verse, which is based on songs from Everclear's "Songs From an American Movie".
> 
> _Joe turned eighteen and walked out of Nick's life. Nick turned eighteen and walked into Joe's._

When Denise was pregnant with Nick, Joe was just turning three. He wasn’t quite old enough to completely grasp the concept, but he seemed to understand when he was told that there was a baby growing in his mommy’s tummy—and his excitement grew in pace with his new brother. After he and Kevin accompanied Denise to an appointment with her doctor, Joe ran around for days trying to imitate the sound of the heart monitor because he thought it was the baby’s special language and he wanted to learn it.

“Mine,” Joe would say, his tiny hands splayed across Denise’s rounded abdomen.

“That’s right, Joey, that’s your little brother Nicholas.” Denise couldn’t help but smile when Joe giggled every time the baby shifted or kicked, wonder in his eyes.

Kevin, a bit of a know it all at age four, was the one to break the news to Joe that he wouldn’t be the baby anymore. Denise overheard the conversation while she stood at the open kitchen window and watched the boys dig in the old truck tire that Paul had turned into a sandbox. Joe just shrugged and told Kevin that it was okay, he didn’t mind not being the baby anymore—he wanted to be a big brother just like Kevin.

Joe spent months begging for a baby of his own, standing in the middle of the toy aisle with his eyes wide and his arms outstretched. It was against her better judgment that Denise finally relented, allowing her son to pick out a Cabbage Patch doll with round blue eyes and a tuft of frizzy yarn for hair. She had to take the doll out of the package before she even buckled her son into his booster seat, and he clung tightly to the soft body the entire way home.

The doll would eventually become one of the many things that her husband would use as an example when he blamed her for Joe being gay—but in those early, innocent days, nothing made her smile more than watching her younger son care for his baby. It didn’t take long for the doll to have its own nursery in the corner of Joe and Kevin’s room, complete with tiny fake diapers and bottles. More than once, Denise caught Joe sneaking into the nursery to steal the soft receiving blankets that she’d spent the duration of her pregnancy crocheting.

Joe abandoned his doll the day that Nick came home from the hospital, swaddled tight in the purple blanket Joe had insisted Denise make. From that day forward, Nick was the only baby that Joe wanted. Denise would wake up in the middle of the night to feed the baby and find Joe asleep on the floor next to the crib, wrapped tight in a blanket with his thumb in his mouth. Carrying him back to his own bed was fruitless, because he’d be right back in the same spot the next morning.

Mornings and afternoons with the boys stretched into long evenings while Paul traveled between four different churches and counseled members of the congregations. Practically alone in an unfamiliar city, Denise spent most of her time with her sons. Her high school friends were finishing grad school and starting careers by the time her second son was born—any common threads between them long severed. Only twenty six and already the mother of three young boys, she found that she had a hard time relating to the older mothers of her husband’s congregation. So she doted on her sons, perhaps more than she should have at times—but the boys were all she had.

Denise did everything that she could to make sure that her boys were raised right, and Joe’s exit from the family made her question all of it. Paul blamed her for plenty, but she blamed herself for just as much. If she hadn’t bought him that doll, if she hadn’t let him play with her makeup, if she hadn’t coddled him, if she hadn’t, if she hadn’t, if she hadn’t. Out of all of the things that Denise blamed herself for, she felt that her biggest mistake was letting Nick and Joe be as close as they were—because it eventually cost her both of them.

Her heart broke the day that Joe walked out of the house—and it continued to break every day afterward as she watched Nick withdraw further and further from the family. Without Joe around to temper the younger boy’s personality, Nick became stoic and reserved, serious in a way that no teenage boy should have been. She didn’t even recognize him some days.

Nick—her Nick, Joe’s Nick—was gone long before that cool September morning when Denise stood in front of the hallway window and watched him load a suitcase into the back of a taxi. She’d been waiting for this day for three years and even though she knew that she should be trying to stop him—she only felt relief. The corner of her mouth quirked up in a sad smile and she pressed her hand against the glass in a silent goodbye as the taxi pulled away from the curb.


End file.
